How feedback is an effective tool for Business Success 

Feedback is an essential tool to build a person's leadership, empathy, and communication skills by listening, identifying, and acting on thoughts, feeling, and experiences. Feedback is underrated both for the transformation of individual skills and importance in a business. It is a process to listen and understand ways, actionable to make things better. Feedback is instrumental for actionable insights in a business by capturing customers'’ feelings, thoughts, and expectations across the complete journey.

 If feedback is such an essential ingredient to becoming better both from an individual and business point of view, then why is it not that utilized? Why do organizations yet have to wake up to this underrated tool to organize, scale-up, innovate, and enhance customer engagement, including internal and external customers? Is it lethargy in collecting feedback or simply ignorance in the process and its importance? Most of the time, it is both, and we, through this blog, are trying to reason out an effective way to collect feedback and how it impacts business success.

One of the primary reasons for the lack of utilization of the feedback process is that feedback collected doesn't yield many actionable inputs for the business. We often discover that intensely critical feedback that is awkward and harsh can have a detrimental effect on the business plans for employees and suppliers. In the times of the digital age, when data and each interaction provide some input as feedback, this sleuth of data and the sheer thought of collecting and making sense of it usually overwhelms decision-makers and organizations. So ignorance for the feedback process or simply getting defensive in understanding the intent has become a common norm.

Feedback in today's time can give insights to a business to enhance customer satisfaction, product improvement through innovation and by designing new ways, features, approaches, and even enhancing customer support. For instance, think about creating a website and utilizing the feedback of a representative group to assess the flow, patterns, and ease in usage to enhance customer satisfaction through the website. Sounds exciting and needs focus and discipline by the business to invite and use feedback in improving its deliverables while also remaining vigilant to the feedback giver’s perspective and time. Usually, the absence of this crucial feedback diminishes the chances of customer engagement.

Feedback also collected to make performance better usually gets hindered due to its limited scope. Research proves that feedback if taken to improve performance doesn't help much as thoughts and feelings are limited by customers' knowledge, understanding, and unconscious biases. More data points and then averaging those improve the learnings from the feedback process. But most of the time, it is limited because more data points improve the random error in the data but not the systematic error. By definition, random error is one time, out-of-turn error due to chance; hence the statistical and thoughtful process can eliminate it.

In contrast, systematic error is a part of the process and can have far more ramifications to improve. Systematic errors are part of the process and not by chance. Thus, a feedback process through an objective viewpoint and process while considering the various biases and errors can provide a business with actionable inputs for action through their digital interactions and structured feedback collection process including cumulative and transactional ones.

We highlight three tenets through this blog to improve the feedback for actionable inputs. 

Use feedback with the Intent to listen and understand

Intent on why the feedback is being captured and analyzed makes all the difference. Customers, both internal and external, share experiences and feelings when describing an event, an occurrence, and a transaction while interacting with a business through a touchpoint. Hence along with scores, the open-ended questions are instrumental in analyzing what is working and why so? 

When captured with Intent to understand, improve and get better, feedback will always find takers and the candid view from employees, customers, and suppliers. There will be candid, harsh truths that can be detrimental to business motivation and plans. This doesn't mean at all that harsh feedback should be discouraged or should be constructively put aside. Instead, it will need an objective, outcome-based analysis to filter, analyze the feedback, and correlate with other indicators to utilize for actionable inputs.

Importance of feedback Process

 There are a lot of tools that are utilized by businesses, including "Voice of Customer," "Customer Satisfaction," "Live chat," "Social Media Interaction," "NPS," or simple "email" surveys with different modalities and Intent to capture. All are instrumental at different points of time to listen, analyze and act. For instance, NPS is used to analyze the pulse of customer feedback by first a score-based question and then an open-ended question to find the reason for the same.

 1. Seeking feedback in real-time or when the event is happening, or you just completed the execution can have different viewpoints due to time-lapse and various biases that come into action. Insights in real-time by different stakeholders are instrumental in gauging the friction during performances, interactions, and corresponding emotions.

2. Language, too, can make a lot of difference. So instead of just asking if there is any feedback for me, more thoughts can be assessed by the business by asking how they can improve the product/service deliverables.

- What was worked for the customers?

- What was that which needs more work?

Effective feedback is about Intent, context as it is about remaining open to listen and receive. Thus finding the reasons behind the scores is more important than dashboards to show where and how the organizational deliverables provide an impact.

Closing the feedback loop

 An essential part of a feedback process is about closing the feedback loop. 

Closing the feedback loop means the following –

1. It is to humbly and graciously accept the thoughts, feelings, and experiences shared by the customer, including internal and external, for their interaction through the entire customer journey. More quantity or more feedback pointers will slowly support in enhancing the quality of actionable inputs.

2. Creating a follow-up implementation and action plan after scrutinizing the relevant information in an unbiased manner without errors will support achieving the business objective.

3. Communicating the resultant action plans to the customers who gave feedback is the most crucial part to close the feedback loop and to keep the loop open for more candid feedback in the future. It is also true in complaints or regular interaction on social media or feedback for a relevant tool to business.

 Actionable input for business will improve deliverables, clarify objectives to employees, and identify touch-points where deliverables faltered for the customers. Feedback at the business ideation stage improves innovation as product/service can be tuned in as per customer needs, expectations, thus enhancing the chances of creating the right product-market fit. Feedback is instrumental for business success through more engaged employees, customers, decision-makers, and above all, deliverables to ensure the business remains agile to achieve its objectives. 

 Write to us to know more about feedback, and how it can support your business success at contact @pinkguava.org